


A Little Wizard

by Popchop



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, I Don't Even Know, I'll catch you all on the flipside, belief in kindness, but I promise it gets better, cw: child abuse, fuck dumbledore tho, major canon diversion incoming?, s/o to #harrypotter, struggles with morality, the weird cognitive dissonance between the early books and the late and trying to reconcile them, this starts hella depressing, written with the encouragement of bredfriends
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-06
Updated: 2017-11-05
Packaged: 2019-01-09 18:18:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12281910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Popchop/pseuds/Popchop
Summary: The trials of the wizard assigned to prevent Harry Potter from being taken away by Social Services or anyone else, because.........well, why, exactly?





	1. Chapter 1

Once on a dark winter’s evening, fog rolled through Little Whinging. It flooded around the old Norman church with its tall tower, through the gaps between old houses that stood like broken teeth in the mouth of the village, and poured into the new housing estate. The new primary school - St Hildas Church Of England Primary - stood out like an island of one-storey school buildings (and more then a few portakabins) surrounding the old school hall with its big bell. The playground was abandoned and only a few staff members remained on site.  
Ms Siskin was, in many ways, a sweet woman. She was of middling years, and the goodness that she had done through her life was reflected in her intense, attractive face and in the way that the children under her care flourished. She was the sort of woman who always had a half-eaten packet of werthers originals at the bottom of her handbag, along with a small sewing kit and some carefully wrapped cheese and pickle sandwiches, because it was necessary to be prepared. Ms Siskin was also in possession of six cats (Captain Paws II, Margot, Phoebe, Peanut, Charlie and Bandit) and was a confirmed spinster, something she seemed very contented with. To say Ms Siskin was a confirmed spinster is not precisely correct - more that the town of Little Whinging (apparently in the hope that one fails to acknowledge the presence of lesbians they will cease to exist, not unlike monsters beneath the bed) pretended to ignore the presence of her on-again-off-again girlfriend.  
She was, on that night in nineteen eighty six, just about to leave. She had stayed late on a matter of some importance that is not particularly germane to the story (important to her, but unfortunately not to the narrative), and was just closing the door to her classroom behind her when she thought she heard something from out in the dark hall, from somewhere beyond the tiny rows of coat racks.  
“Hello?” she called, peering at them. “Is someone there?”  
She immediately berated herself - if someone was lurking out there with bad intentions, surely they wouldn’t announce it - and, feeling slightly self-conscious, slid her keys in between the fingers of one hand.  
“Hello?” she tried again, peering into the shadows - and then jumping as a figure emerged from the darkness amongst the child-sized coat racks. She almost threw her keys at him, in fact, but managed to restrain herself just in time, which was rather fortunate considering that she worked with him.  
“Sorry!” The man straightened up, a broom in one hand, and she realised with a flood of relief who it was. He was a large man in his mid-sixties, with curly white-grey hair and a limp - Mr Brown, the caretaker. He had received the limp in the second world war, she had been told, though he didn’t like to talk about it. Mr Brown had a kind way of speaking and a gentle manner that Ms Siskin had always found rather charming, and the two of them got along famously. Her charges also found it rather charming, as he was the sort of man who was happy to help get a ball off of the roof of the school with a ladder and a well-aimed poke of a broom.  
“Good heavens, Mr Brown, you did give me a fright”  
“Sorry, ma’am” he grinned, nodding his head to her. “Didn’t realise you were still here to frighten, Miss Siskin. If you wait ten minutes, I can walk you home. It’s an ill moon tonight”  
“That’s very kind of you” she said warmly - because the caretaker was always kind to her, and it never did pay to annoy the man who cleaned and kept the school. “But I think I shall be alright - whoever heard of anything happening in Little Whinging?”  
“That’s true enough” Mr Brown allowed. “Still - you take care. That fog is proper nasty, it is, and I don’t like it one bit. T’aint natural! Man can’t see a foot in front of his own nose!”  
“I’ll be careful!” she laughed, and patted him on the shoulder as she went past, heading for the double doors out into the playground. “It’s very sweet of you to worry”  
“Have a good night!” he called after her, and she stepped out into the freezing fog.  
Her way home was lit by streetlights which emerged like columns of light from the fog, illuminating her briefly before she stepped back into the fuzzy dimness. She sort of wished she had brought a torch, or even that she’d taken Mr Brown up on his offer. Ms Siskin lived in one of the chocolate-box old houses on the outskirts of Little Whinging, the opposite side from the housing estate. In years to come, the old village would be entirely swallowed up by housing estates as it turned fully into the commuter town it was destined to be, but for now the house backed onto a dairy farm, and she was often woken at five in the morning by the sound of sleepy cattle being herded into the milking shed.  
Her way home - even though it was clouded by fog - was lit by a strange sense of unease, as if someone was watching her. She was fairly certain that it was a combination of her earlier fright and the fog (Ms Siskin was an eminently rational person) but she still ended up running the last few feet to her door, fumbling with keys and letting herself in all in a rush before half-sliding down the door, laughing at her own ridiculousness. Of course there was no one following her! Things like that simply didn’t happen here.  
Well, it was true: they didn’t. No one followed her home: they were already waiting for her in the kitchen. She had put down her coat - well, slung it over the back of a chair - and was just going to put the kettle on (not bothering to turn on the light) the old-fashioned range when she caught a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned very sharply to find herself face to face with a tall woman wearing the most outlandish clothes she could imagine (and Ms Siskin could imagine a lot), as though she had walked off of the cover of a romance novel. Certainly, she was not expecting a black woman dressed not unlike Jareth the Goblin King (Ms Siskin had gone to see Labyrinth the weekend before with her girlfriend) in her kitchen, and she couldn’t help the strangled squeak she let out.  
“What are - who are - ?”  
“Hey, it’s okay! Let’s just… turn on the lights, yeah?” The lights came on, without anyone apparently reaching for the switch. “Okay? Okay. Right. Hi. I’m Wit Bolingbroke. I’m not here to steal anything, or cause any trouble, I just need to talk to you”  
“Talk to me? About what?” Ms Siskin asked faintly.  
“Harry Potter” Wit said, with a very melancholy sigh. “You did put in a report to social services, didn’t you?”  
“I - uh, yes…?” she said, now more confused then alarmed. Social Services didn’t break into your house in the middle of the night, and she couldn’t understand why this woman was asking about little Harry Potter…  
“Did you talk to anyone else about it?”  
“No!” Best to say that - to not pull anyone else into this. She hadn’t discussed it with them, anyway. Ms Siskin had been considering switching schools for a while, but the apathy displayed by her fellow professionals clinched it. She would much rather be somewhere that cared about all its students, rather than just the ones who were easiest to love.  
“Well, that makes this easier” Wit said, and her stomach turned over. She thought about where the closest knife might be. Had she left one on the cutting board when she was making her sandwiches this morning? How quickly could she grab for it? She realised that the woman was holding something in one hand and pointing it, and -  
And she forgot. She forgot entirely about her report to social services, about the strange woman in her home, and indeed about her concerns about little Harry Potter, who always seemed to be hungry and whose uniforms were always second hand, while his cousin seemed to grow taller every day and his brand new uniforms always fit perfectly. Harry Potter’s learning and skills were always a little behind the curve of where she would expect it to be - though he was bright - and though she could not put her finger on a specific incident, she was unhappy with the way his aunt and uncle had treated him when she had seen them all together, and with the way they encouraged their son to treat him. She forgot about that.  
She would - if left to her own devices - call social services every three months, as regularly as clockwork, and this was thus Wit’s second visit to her. In the past few years, Wit had also visited social services three times, the Dursley’s next door neighbours four times, and had once had to perform a mass memory charm on an entire coven of play-group women.  
Wit let herself out of the back door, standing in the back garden for a full minute, before wiping her eyes and disapparating.  
She did not go straight home - partly because she was sure that Agnes would read the guilt on her face - but went via Diagon Alley, where she withdrew a substantial sum from her savings and put it straight into the charity bucket of a teenage witch collecting for War Orphans. It did not make her feel any better or assuage her conscience, but she hadn’t truly expected it to.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wit talks to Agnes

Wit and her girlfriend Agnes lived in what could probably be best described as a bedsit - it only had two rooms by dint of one of them being a bathroom - as they had little money, either inherited or earned. This was not at all due to choice of profession, Wit being a trainee auror (although Agnes was - alternately - a children’s book author & illustrator and the sort of woman who found a niche in the market, the current niche being demonstrating to pureblood children with forward thinking parents how to do simple everyday muggle tasks like using the telephone or the underground), but largely due to the ridiculous state of the London housing market, magical or not.   
It did, however, have the advantage of being slightly larger then it had any right to be (considering the physical space it occupied on the outside), a common feature of wizard dwellings, and was thus not horrifically cramped but only a little so, and was as fashionably chintzy as it could possibly be in compensation. Wit let herself in and shut the door very quickly (there were a number of enchantments to try to prevent Agnes’ niffler escaping, but that did not prevent an open door being a tempting portal to the outside world). Keeping a niffler indoors was a recipe for trouble even at the best of times, which was why the slight enlargement was given over to the equivalent of an enrichment area for the creature. The dirt square in the floor was patiently filled every morning with deeply-buried shiny objects, which were gleefully excavated and stashed away throughout the course of the day, assuming that Agnes couldn’t bring the animal with her to wherever she was going.   
Agnes was home when Wit came in, cooking dinner in the tiny kitchen area with a copy of An Invitation to Indian Cooking propped open against the measuring scales. Radio 1 was burbling away in the background, and as Agnes came in the music had halted for a rerun of their current campaign.   
“If you’re worried about AIDS, play safe. Call us on -“   
Agnes was a small and rather round witch, with large grey-green eyes that Wit never tired of looking at. She was, in character, probably the fiercest and most magnificent person that she knew, and had more anger in her then her body was capable of containing - it flowed out into all sorts of good causes and charitable events, and it was a rare week when no one at the Ministry of Magic received a strongly worded Howler at their desk from her. Most weeks that was due to the treatment of non-human sentient species - she was particularly hot on the treatment of dwarves - but she was a bountiful font of righteous anger.  
Wit, knowing how little her girlfriend liked to be interrupted when she was cooking, which was an exercise of immense concentration, kissed her on the cheek and retreated to the sofa-bed with a cup of tea. The niffler, which had been stuck with the slightly improbable name of Edgar, came and snuggled up in her lap, and it wasn’t long until Agnes, bearing two bowls of dahl and rice, joined her.   
“How was your day?” she asked, passing her a bowl.   
“Oh, fine” Wit said, her mouth half-full of rice and lentils, although there was an awful guilty feeling in the pit of her stomach and she found it a little hard to swallow. “I mean, nothing I can talk about, you know?”   
“Is there ever?” Agnes said dryly. As much as she loved her partner, she was increasingly frustrated by her reticence about what she did on a day to day basis.   
“Apparently not” Wit said, and the guilty feeling intensified. “But - what did you do?”   
This was as if it was not obvious from the art supplies liberally scattered about the bedsit, or even the smudge of ink on her forehead. Wit adored listening to Agnes talk about her work, and would take any opportunity to provoke her into it. However, this evening it did not cheer or warm her one bit. Her stomach was still churning with guilt over what she had done earlier, and she couldn’t make it go away.   
She had been told, that is, Dumbledore himself had told her, that the only way to protect Harry from the remaining Death Eaters and from the wizarding public was to ensure that he grew up with his own kin. Dumbledore had done some sort of charm to protect him, but it relied on consanguinity. That seemed reasonable, as a first point. Blood and love were both potent magical components, and though he hadn’t explained everything to her, she had put enough together to make a good guess at what was going on.   
What did not seem reasonable in the least was the kin that Dumbledore had left them with… and that he seemed to be ignoring her increasingly urgent reports on how that did not seem to be working. She could not imagine that she was the only person watching the Potter boy, and she wondered if they were getting anything but the vaguest of responses to their own reports. Multiple muggles had attempted to have him removed from his relative’s custody for what seemed very good reasons, and it was only Wit’s efforts that had prevented it. Her anxiety worsened as she considered this and whether she had in fact been doing the right thing. She wanted rather desperately to talk to Agnes, who was her rock and her moral compass, about this, but to do so would be to betray Dumbledore’s confidence. Consider, if you will, the agony of her dilemma, and the clarity that came upon her then: however safe Harry may be where he was, physically, a child had more needs then that. To allow him to grow up in such an environment when she could prevent it would be an act of evil of the sort that she had joined the Order of the Phoenix to prevent.  
“You’re not listening to a word I said” Agnes scolded her, and Wit blinked, coming back to the conversation.   
“No, I wasn’t” she said contritely. “I’m sorry, I drifted off”   
“You’ve been very distracted lately” Agnes said with a frown. “What’s eating you?”   
Wit hesitated, feeling as though the edges of the world were going grey around her, then let it spill out: what Dumbledore had asked her to do, what she had been doing, how sick and tired she was of it, how much she was afraid for the child.   
Agnes was silent for a good thirty seconds when Wit finally ran dry of words, and then put her bowl of supper down very slowly on the floor and stood up, brushing her lap free of any spilt rice.   
“Get your coat” she said, making for the door. “We’re going down to the Daily Prophet’s office first and then we’re going straight to Privet Drive with the first reporter we can drag down there, because that child isn’t spending one more day there - with those -”   
“But - shouldn’t we at least try going through Dumble -”   
“He had his chance!” she said fiercely, whirling to confront her. “He had his chance and he did this and he made you complicit in it. This is not what I would have expected of you, and I’m - I’m ashamed of you. If you don’t get your coat right this moment, Wit Bolingbroke, then you can start packing”  
“No, I agree with you” Wit said wretchedly. “I’m just not sure that going straight to the Prophet is the right thing. I don’t want to bring Dumbledore down -“  
“Oh, I do” Agnes said nastily.   
“- and,” Wit added hastily, “You know how sensational the Prophet can be - do you want the boy to have whatever they write hanging over him for the rest of his life?”   
“That…” Agnes hesitated, then put her coat down, “is a very good point”   
“Just give it a minute before we go off half-cocked” Wit said, “there’s got to be a way of rescuing him”


	3. Chapter 3

“There’s a new couple moved into number three, Vernon” Mrs Dursley said, peering through the net curtains in the front room. Somewhere in the background on the radio, Michael Parkinson was asking Benny Green what luxury item he would take onto his desert island, and further away - somewhere out in the garden - there was the sound of children (who had been turned out on the basis of it being good for them) yelling.   
“Mm” Mr Dursley grunted from behind the sports section of the Mail on Sunday.   
“They haven’t got much furniture,” Petunia said, “and they seem very… modern”  
“Expect they’re commuters” he said absently.  
“One of them’s black, Vernon” Petunia said, sounding slightly scandalised. “They’re kissing”   
“You’ll have to write to the paper” Vernon said. “Export of the inner cities and all that. Undesirable elements in Little Whinging”   
“I think I’ll take a cake around” Petunia said decisively, craning her long neck around to get a better view. “Vanilla sponge” If you had to describe Petunia Dursley in one word it would be ‘nosy’, and she wanted nothing more in that moment then to know everything about her new neighbours.   
“Capital” said Mr Dursley, who loved his wife very much, but only in an abstract sort of way where her interior life was largely unimportant, and wasn’t particularly paying attention. This was a shame, because if he had been a little more appreciative of the emotional and physical labour she did for him, they probably would have been a great deal happier. But then, if Mr Dursley had been the sort to appreciate emotional labour, he would not have been the truly awful and small minded man he was.  
“I think I’ll take a trip into London next weekend” Petunia said, still peering out from between the curtains. “To Hamleys. Mrs Smith said that they have those lazer tag sets back in stock, and Dudders deserves something really special for Christmas this year”   
There was a crash from somewhere outside, and some very colourful swearing. Petunia tsk-tsked. 

 

Later: a small brown boy peered over the wall, glanced back over his shoulder, then heaved himself bodily over. As he wasn’t particularly tall, this involved a lot of wriggling and flailing of limbs as he managed to get himself first on top of the wall and then fell off of it sideways with a soft thump and an ‘ow!’. A good twenty seconds later - enough that any casual observer might not perceive a connection between the two things - another boy, plump and blonde to his cousin’s slight and dark, pitched up at the wall, scowled, and then walked away. He looked as though he had both forgotten what exactly he was there for and was furious about it. 

“A boy just climbed over our fence” Agnes said, looking out of the kitchen window, pale hands cradling a cup of tea. “Should we - oh, no, he’s gone”  
“What?” Wit yelled from the living room, where she was unpacking boxes while Agnes made them both a cuppa.   
“A boy just - oh, never mind” Agnes said, adding sugar to Wit’s cup of tea instead. She’d have to put up the anti-muggle charms sooner rather then later, if children were going to make a habit of climbing over walls around here. Who knew what they might see? Not to mention a couple of spells to keep Edgar, who she rather anticipated enjoying the new space, in.   
She brought the tea back into the living room a minute later. Wit was screwing the legs back onto a coffee table. They had managed to borrow a van from her uncle to transport everything, rather then trying complicated spell work or apparating large book cases into the place. After all, they were trying to be at least a little discreet. Wit was exceedingly glad to take a break - and gladder yet for the over-sugared tea.   
“We should really put up the anti-muggle charms in the garden soon” Agnes said, settling down onto the sofa bed, which had made the trip rather well.   
“I already did?” Wit said - it had been almost the first thing she had done after they’d secured the property.   
“Huh, okay” Agnes said, making a mental note to check her girlfriend’s work (it had not yet occurred to her who, exactly, the child was). “Do you have to get back to work soon?”   
“About half an hour” Wit said. “I’ll drop off the forms to have this place re-connected to the floo network when I get there”   
“I hate moving” Agnes grumbled, and Wit leaned over and kissed her cheek.   
“I know - still, greater good, right?”   
“The greater good” Agnes echoed.   
They had taken out a massive mortgage from Gringotts - helpfully connected into muggle currency - to be able to afford this house, on the strength of Wit’s promotion to full Auror and Agnes pawning some treasured goblin-made jewellery (“well, it wasn’t like it’s exactly mine anyway…”) she had owned.   
“And when you get home” Agnes promised, “We can go out, get some fish and chips”   
“That sounds good” Wit said gratefully.   
“And as soon as we’ve got everything set up right, I’ll go and fetch Edgar from your mum”   
Wit’s mother, Szarlota, was as delighted by magical animals as Agnes was (something which led the two of them to get on exceedingly well). Her home - a small suburban one - had a slightly-too-large garden that, defying all normal geography, backed onto a great and mighty wood that didn’t seem to exist when you looked from the road in front of the house. The wood was home to a number of magical creatures, including a small herd of unicorns who were closely monitored by a preservation trust. The number of unicorns was on the decline in Britain - due partly to the loss of habitat - and Szarlota Bolingbroke both kind of kept them (by a broad definition of ‘kept’) and made her living by collecting their shed hair. She fully expected Wit - as her only daughter - to someday move home and take care of them, something Wit was decidedly iffish on. On the one hand, she could agree that it would be a nice place to bring up children and unicorn preservation was important, but on the other… on the other, she had her own life to lead. She suspected that she would - someday - bow to that pressure and step into the role, but really it was much more of Agnes’ thing.   
“Have I mentioned how much I appreciate you being the competent one in our relationship?” Wit said.   
“Not nearly enough” Agnes said, and smiled. “Do it a little more”

Wit had been gone for several hours and Agnes had given up on unpacking boxes and was just lying on the sofa bed and vacantly staring at the ceiling, as one does when one is bone-weary and not particularly motivated to do more, when there was an insistent ring of the doorbell. She considered ignoring it - it could not be any of her friends, who would not have rung the doorbell but would have walked straight in - but when it rang again she groaned and levered herself upright.   
“Can I help?” she said, on levering open the door. She was confronted with Petunia Dursley, which was not a sight that any good witch should be confronted with when all she really, honestly, truly wants is a nap.   
“Petunia Dursley” Mrs Dursley said, with a sharp smile. “I’m your next-door neighbour”   
Agnes wondered - very briefly - if there was anything blatantly magical lying about, then decided that, fuck it, she had a wand and a memory charm wasn’t that hard. It was harder to resist just cursing the woman outright, but they were still feeling out the situation here, and she was working on her patience.   
“Agnes Freyrdottir” she said, extending a hand. “Pleased to meet you. Do come in?”


End file.
